6 min
Coach less in the first four minutes
The most reliable improvement available to almost every coach I watch, and it costs nothing but the discomfort of standing there.
Watch a coach start a practice and count the seconds before the first instruction. It is usually under twenty, and it is almost always too early, because the players have not yet met the problem the practice was designed to give them. Solving a problem somebody has not encountered is not coaching; it is talking.
Four minutes of silence at the start of every practice is the single change I ask coaches to make first, and it is the one they resist most, because standing still while a session goes badly feels like negligence. It is not. The failure in those four minutes is what makes the next instruction land, and the difference in how the players receive it is not subtle.
If you cannot manage four, start with two. Almost every coach who tries this tells me the same thing afterwards: they ended up saying less overall, and the players remembered more of it.
Writing
Why your possession drill teaches nothing
A rondo with no direction trains a skill the game never asks for. Here is the version that does, and the one line you have to add.
The model with thirty principles is not a model
If your players cannot recite it at 3–2 down with eight minutes left, it is a document rather than a model.